[arin-ppml] Fee structures for ARIN

[Jeff Wheeler]

On Fri, Oct 28, 2011 at 4:43 PM, John Curran <jcurran at arin.net> wrote:
> In general, would you prefer seeing all of the $base fees be higher
> (e.g. $250) or have ARIN charge separately for new service features,
> even those which might improve the security or quality of registry
> data for everyone?

I would like better services.  If that means that fees increase, I am
fine with that.  I hope we aren't forgetting that ARIN has accumulated
a war chest of about $26M USD and continues to operate at an annual
surplus.  This is not bad, but anyone who says fees have to increase
significantly or immediately for ARIN to provide additional services
just hasn't spent five minutes reading about how much revenue ARIN
receives and what its expenses are.  Truly, if it costs a million
dollars to write some Perl scripts and provide members with better
tools, ARIN can do that without increasing anyone's fees.

As you know, my primary concern is DFZ bloat and routing stability.  I
do not think RPKI is necessarily the best way to address this, but it
is one possible technical solution.  Another would be dramatically
improving the ARIN IRR, making it more user-friendly for both
publishing routing information and querying it.  We can certainly ask
ARIN to do both these things, not just one or the other.

Eventually, we will have one too many major leaks that result in
newspaper articles about "China" "intercepting" Internet traffic,
Youtube being blackholed as a result of technical errors by
governments trying to block it within their own borders spilling over
to the larger Internet, etc.  Government already wants this to stop
(who doesn't?) and if we don't come up with a good way to do it
ourselves, legislation will eventually force a bad way upon us -- some
kind of regulation that we don't want.

We should all be asking ARIN to spend its time and money on this
problem.  As a neutral party driven by the community, ARIN can and
should be the routing table cops.  It's eventually going to be
someone, and I'd rather it be ARIN than some government entity,
VeriSign, or whatever.

-- 
Jeff S Wheeler <jsw at inconcepts.biz>
Sr Network Operator  /  Innovative Network Concepts